Upcoming VS Online Licensing Changes

Through the fall and spring, we transitioned VS Online from Preview to General Availability. That process included changes to branding, the SLA, the announcement of pricing, the end of the early adopter program and more. We’ve been working closely with customers to understand where the friction is and what we can do to make adopting VS Online as easy as possible. This is a continuing process and includes discussions about product functionality, compliance and privacy, pricing and licensing, etc. This is a journey and we’ll keep taking feedback and adjusting.

Today I want to talk about one set of adjustments that we want to make to licensing.

As we ended the early adopter period, we got a lot of questions from customers about how to apply the licensing to their situation. We also watched as people assigned licenses to their users: What kind of licenses did they choose? How many people did they choose to remove from their account? Etc.

From all of this learning, we’ve decided to roll out 2 licensing changes in the next couple of months:

Stakeholders

A common question we saw was “What do I do with all of the stakeholders in my organization?” While the early adopter program was in effect and all users were free, customers were liberal with adding people to their account. People who just wanted to track progress or file a bug or a suggestion occasionally, were included. As the early adopter period ended, customers had to decide – Is this really worth $20/user/month (minus appropriate Azure discounts)? The result was that many of these “stakeholders” were removed from the VS Online accounts in the transition, just adding more friction for the development teams.

As a result of all this feedback we proposed a new “Stakeholder” license for VS Online. Based on the scenarios we wanted to address, we designed a set of features that matched the needs most customers have. These include:

Full read/write/create on all work items

Create, run and save (to “My Queries”) work item queries

View project and team home pages

Access to the backlog, including add and update (but no ability to reprioritize the work)

We the surveyed our “Top Customers” and tuned the list of features (to arrive at what I listed above). One of the conversations we had with them was about the price/value of this feature set. We tested 3 different price points – $5/user/month, $2/user/month and free. Many thought it was worth $5. Every single one thought it was worth $2. However, one of the questions we asked was “How many stakeholders would you add to your account at each of these price points?” The result was 3X more stakeholders if it’s free than if it’s $2. That told us that any amount of money, even if it is perceived as “worth it”, is too much friction. Our goal is to enable everyone who has a stake to participate in the development process (and, of course, to run a business in the process). Ultimately, in balancing the goals of enabling everyone to participate and running a business, we concluded that “free” is the right answer.

As a result, any VSOnline account will be able to have an unlimited number of “Stakeholder” users with access to the functionality listed above, at no charge.

Access to the Test Hub

Another point of friction that emerged in the transition was access to the Test hub. During the Preview, all users had access to the Test hub but, at the end of the early adopter program, the only way to get access to the Test hub was by purchasing Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN (or one of the other products that include it, like VS Premium or VS Ultimate).

We got ample feedback that there were a class of users who really only need access to the web based Test functionality and don’t need all that’s in VS Test Professional.

Because of this, we’ve decided to include access to all of the Test hub functionality in the Visual Studio Online Advanced plan.

Timing

I’m letting you know now so that, if you are currently planning your future, you know what is coming. I’m always loathe to get too specific about dates in the future because, as we all know, stuff happens. However, we are working hard to implement these licensing changes now and my expectation is that we’ve got about 2 sprints of work to do to get it all finished. That would put the effective date somewhere in the neighborhood of mid-August. I’ll update you with more certainty as the date gets a little closer.

What about Team Foundation Server?

In general, our goal is to keep the licensing for VS Online and Team Foundation Server as “parallel” as we can – to limit how confusing it could be. As a result, we will be evolving the current “Work Item Web Access” TFS CAL exemption (currently known as “Limited” users in TFS) to match the “Stakeholder” capabilities. That will result in significantly more functionality available to TFS users without CALs. My hope is to get that change made for Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4. It’s too early yet to be sure that’s going to be possible but I’m hopeful. We do not, currently, plan to provide an alternate license for the Test Hub functionality in TFS, though it’s certainly something we’re looking at and may have a solution in a future TFS version.

Conclusion

As I said, it’s a journey and we’ll keep listening. It was interesting to me to watch the phenomenon of the transition from Preview to GA. Despite announcing the planned pricing many months in advance, the feedback didn’t get really intense until, literally, the week before the end of the early adopter period when everyone had to finish choosing licenses.

One of the things that I’m proud of is that we were able to absorb that feedback, create a plan, review it with enough people, create an engineering plan and (assuming our timelines hold), deliver it in about 3 months. In years past that kind of change would take a year or two.

Hopefully you’ll find this change valuable. We’ll keep listening to feedback and tuning our offering to create the best, most friction-free solution that we can.

@Daniel, Strictly speaking, we haven't settled on the App Insights licensing model, so it's free to everyone. I expect we'll sort out the App Insights licensing model this fall, at which point I'll have more to say about it.

Brian

5 years ago

Betty

For those of us with an EA and only need to do a True Up once a year, will we need to true up for new users if the license change kicks in before the true up review?

5 years ago

James Rice

@Betty: the EA true-up process is actually just for normal software licenses–it exists for the scenario where you might begin running certain software products during the year, allowing you to "catch up" with payments all at once on your anniversary. Software can be copied or reinstalled, so that's why the true-up process is needed.

This is different from Azure, where you simply pay for what you use.. For reference, VSO is a set of SaaS services (not traditional software licenses) sold via Azure. Keep in mind that you don't need to connect your VSO account to Azure until you need to buy services over and above the free amounts we provide to everyone.

So with VSO, when you need to add users to your account you buy them up front through the Azure Management Portal (manage.windowsazure.com)–so there's no "catch up" later. Drill into your VSO account within the Azure Management Portal and visit the "Scale" tab where you can change the amount of paid VSO user plans to however many you need–then go to the Users hub in <youraccount>.visualstudio.com to add users with these plans.

5 years ago

Betty

@JamesRice sorry I was referring to TFS on Prem, not VSO.

5 years ago

Daniel

great news.

had MS considered/looked at a licensing change for CodeLens support such that this feature is available in lower edition of Visual Studio 2013 and not only in VS 2013 Ultimate ?

@Daniel, yes, we've talked about it. For now, we've decided to leave it in Ultimate.

Brian

5 years ago

James Rice

@Betty: sorry, I thought you were talking about VSO! OK, yes you'll need to true up for licenses based on the rules in effect when they used TFS. But if you add "stakeholders" after we make TFS licensing changes, there won't be a need to true up for these users.

5 years ago

Sunitha

Hi Brian,

The blog is too helpful and it is a really good news too…. but when it comes to active???

Also i need some more suggestions to improvise the VS Online on test management perspective….

1. There can be an option to export the test cases and results to excel rather copying each column and past it in the excel

2. Also once i done one sprint testing, there can be one option to export the test result with respect to the test cases.

Also, if you have any feedback or questions on test management, you can directly contact me at "ravishan@microsoft.com"

Thanks

-Ravi

5 years ago

Jonathan Dodd

This is great news. Our current project has suffered as you describe as a a result of the end of the Early Adopter licencing model. Stakeholders need to be engaged easily and as much as required in the development cycle, so free licences makes sense so long as permissions are carefully assigned. A future project for us will involve several departments and common stakeholder access to the backlog would be most welcome. Thanks.

5 years ago

Adam

Will stakeholders be able to see features on the backlog? I ask because this is currently limited to the advanced users only.

@Sunitha, The VSO licensing changes will be available in the mid-Aug timeframe and the on-prem TFS ones with TFS 2013 Update 4 towards the end of this year. I'll get someone to answer your test case management questions.

Hi Brian, I know we've spoken about pricing previously so it's great to see this free tier and some transparency into the pricing decisions as well.

5 years ago

Thomas Gallé

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

We are running TFS-2012 with 20 Developers (VS Prof. + MSDN) and 2 ProductOwners (VS Ulti. + MSDN). We have our own Ticket-Types for our production-process. On the Whiteboards we have have Kanban-Boards with Cards for all product-teams. The new Ticketing-System have started few weeks ago. But is was impossible for our Devs to use the "Kanban"-Backlog-Board. And only to use this Feature of the TFS-WebAccess the difference between VS-Prof and VS-Premium is MUCH to high. If TFS-2013-Upd4 will include the backlog (I hope also the "Kanban"-Board) for the "Limited"-Users, … GREAT

Will the "Kanban"-BAcklog-Board be included for Limited-Users?

Remark: I wrote "Kanban", because the Backlog-Board is not a REAL Kanban-Board. For real Kanban you will need also the Sub-States "In Work" an "Done". And both SubStates should be counted against the WIP-Limit.

This is very necessary for Kanban, because for Kanban you have to PULL (not PUSH) the tickets. And therefor you have to know/see if a ticket in a Kanban-State is DONE!

I know that on an electronical Kanban-Board you will not have enough space on the screen for so much Kanban-Columns. But you could visualize both SubStates in only one Kanban-Column with a InWork/Done-Label/Button (eg right-lower corner) on the Card and show the Done-Tickets under the InWork-Tickets. With a Click on the InWork-Label you could switch the Sub-State. Or if you Switch the State (Drag an Drop the Ticket to an other Kanban-Column) the SubState will also be switchetd to InWork. You only need to use a additional Field (CommonConfiguration – TypeFields) for this. And maybe you will make each Kanban-Column customizable, if it should use SubStates or not. So all users, who do not Need the SubStates will have the current behavior. And in this way you could also have Kanban-Columns that will act as a queue (without SubStates). And on the top of the Kanban-Columns you could have counters for "All Tickets in the Column" (Current mode or Queue), "InWork-Tickets in the Column", "Done-Tickets in the column" and WIP-Limit.

If any of those users have MSDN licenses, then likely they already qualify to use VS Online without any additional purchase. For the purposes of the rest of this, I'm going to assume that none of them do.

For the 15 QA, the only option today is to purchase Microsoft Test Professional with MSDN. That will be changing in August and you may be able to purchase VS Online Advanced subscriptions (based on what functionality you need) for them because we are adding the web based testing capabilities to the subscription

For the 4 product owners, you'll want either VS Online Basic or VS Online Advanced depending on whether you want access to advanced features like Team Rooms, Agile portfolio management, etc.

For the 150 users, today, you would have to purchase VSO Basic licenses for them. In mid-August, when the licensing changes I describe here go into effect, they will be free and you could cancel their monthly subscriptions.

@Thomas, The kanban board will be visible but not fully functional to "limited users". Think of it this way, the "stakeholder" license is design for people who are external to the team, watching what they are doing, making suggestions, reporting bugs, asking questions, etc. As a general rule, it would be unusual for a stakeholder to have work assigned to them (though we don't prevent it). But we do prevent some operations (like updating the status of work on the kanban board) because that's really something a member of the team would need to do.

Substates, expedite lanes, etc are in our plan to add to the kanban board. Clearly you could emulate the flow you describe with what we have by just creating 2 columns for each state "Design" and "Design-Done" for instance.

This is THE BEST News! For on-prem TFS, this has always been a problem with getting stakeholders what they need to see the progress of agile teams. The SSRS reports just wasn't a great user experience for stakeholders who wanted to see the progress of the project (burn-down, CFD, product backlog). These licensing changes will truly appeal to agile organizations that need increased visibility in their products.

The decision not to move the Test Hub down to a TFS CAL was a little deflating news in an otherwise excitement-inducing announcement. I still see a need to have multiple levels of QA, depending on what features they need (just like there are multiple levels of Visual Studio [Pro/Premium/Ultimate] for developers, based on what feature-set they need). For the QA that just needs basic Test Case Management without the bells and whistles, the Test Hub is ideal (as well as a TFS CAL). For the more advanced QA that wants Exploratory testing and additional automation that comes with MTM, the VS Test Professional license makes sense.

This is excellent news and remind me of an issue I see with the Storyboarding feature in Scrum.

This features requires either a VS Test Professional, Premium or Ultimate yet it is likely that this feature is most needed by a stakeholder rather than a developer with a Visual Studio license.

Is there any chance a similar rationale can be applied to this feature so Stakeholders (e.g. product owners or even business analysts) can have access to this feature since it is highly unlikely they will ever have a Visual Studio license.

@reidca, by the definition we are using, those are not stakeholders, they are project participants. Stakeholders don't create storyboards. Stakeholders file a bug or make a suggestion or check on the status. If you are actively participating in contributing the project (business analysts, project managers, product owners, etc), then you are a participant, not a stakeholder and a participant requires a license. Now it's a different question about whether or not that's the right product for that kind of participant to buy and whether or not it's the right price. Those are questions we ask ourselves every planning cycle. There are many considerations that go into it. One of the considerations that drives consolidation is licensing/role complexity. 10 years ago, we released Team System with a strategy of more narrow "role" definitions and customers hated it. We collapsed them back down. It's a difficult balancing act. I don't see us making a change here in the short term.

Adoption of break through Software lean practices based on TFS goes viral when teams are not wasting their their time on non value activities like licensing. While necessary, this needs to transparent and simple.

@Brian, Take on board your point – you are right these people are project participant although of course also stakeholders as well in our organisation anyway. However can you also see that it would be crazy for us to purchase a Visual Studio license for them! Product Owners or analysts would never use the tool and therefore it would never be justifiable.

If you can have a stakeholder license can you not also have a "project participants" license that includes use of the supplementary features such as Storyboarding without requiring Visual Studio? This would be easy to justify (if the price was right of course) and I could see how other tooling may be aligned to that type of license.

Thanks

5 years ago

Thomas Gallé

@Brian: "Substates, expedite lanes, etc are in our plan to add to the kanban board. Clearly you could emulate the flow you describe with what we have by just creating 2 columns for each state "Design" and "Design-Done" for instance."

I'm glade to read, that you are planing an enhancement to the kanban board.

Your described Workaround with 2 columns for each state, will not work for our needs. Our process-mgmt wants a real kanban board. So on the Header of a state (with the 2 sub-columns for In-Work and Done) should ONLY be ONE Work-Item-Counter and one WIP-Limit. The ALM-Ranger have released a process-template for Kanban with a Report for kanban-board-visualication. This works the right kanban-way. Please include this way in your planing. (See David J. Anderson)

And once again. Thank you and your Team. You make great work. And the transperencity of this blog is realy amazing.

5 years ago

JS

The parallel test hub licensing on Online in Server would be pretty important. We have many users that would use this functionality without using VS Test Pro for anything (nor would they even know how to).

@reidca, I don't think of VS Test Pro as buying Visual Studio. Certainly it is a Visual Studio branded product but, I suspect that's not the point you are making. It doesn't have Visual Studio in it – there's no compilers, no debugger, no designer, etc. There is however, a Team Explorer, which is base on the VS shell. I think that throws people sometimes but it's just the frame and is a technological choice we made to avoid building two shells. As the web UI gets richer and richer, at some point, we can stop having it altogether. Maybe this is part of your concern?

I suspect the concern is about price/value and that you view Test Pro's price as higher than the value that a BA/Project Manager, etc get. There are a set of features (Team Room, TCM, Enterprise Agile, Storyboarding, Feedback management, etc) that you only get with VS Test Pro and higher. We talk from time to time about creating another "box" that is for BA/Project Manager types and excludes some of the more advanced testing capabilities and providing it at a lower price point.

We haven't done it yet for fear of complexity (people already tell us the licensing is complicated) but we haven't thrown the idea away either. We are experimenting more with licensing on the cloud service first because it's easier to make changes there – which is really what this post is about.

You have understood exactly what I mean. The features you list (Team Room, TCM, Enterprise Agile, Storyboarding, Feedback management, etc) are features that people other than testers would need.

We would love to get our BAs or Product Owners storyboarding, we think it is a very valuable tool and really empowers the business to get involved and design important aspects of the software using a tool (Powerpoint) they are very familiar with. Integration with the Scrum template is an added bonus.

However these people are not testers, nor are they developers. There is just no license that fits for them.

Trying to convince management to purchase Visual Studio licenses (even Test Pro) for people who are neither of these roles is futile and yes, the price point is too high considering they do not require any of the advanced testing functionality. Also the wording Visual Studio is also off putting for these users. For me Visual Studio is the IDE. Full stop. I know there is a huge amount of other bits that come with Visual Studio but I consider it the IDE only.

Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing of any future plans in this area.

So, I am happy to see that end-users/stakeholders will be able to access work-items (e.g. requirements) for free. How soon? SOON, please!

Also, if web test case management will be available through the Advanced license for users like User Acceptance Testers, then it better be available for purchase for one month at a time. The current rate is $60/user/month, but it's not clear whether a year-long purchase is required in the fine print.

@Jon Freed, The change to include the Test Hub in the Advanced license will actually go live next week (though not all the marketing content will be updated until mid-Aug). Yes, you can purchase VS Online subscriptions one months at a time with no commitment. In the future we may offer discounts for commitments but we realize that, particularly for scenarios like UAT, the ability to purchase a short term license if very valuable. The stakeholder license changes are targeted for mid-Aug which is when we hope to "announce" the whole package.

Brian

5 years ago

Lee_WK

Will the TFS CAL exemption be extended to hosted TFS for Team Explorer users?

@Lee_WK, I don't understand the question. Most of this post is about VS Online licensing and is independent of whether you use the web UI or the Team Explorer UI – though I have to admit, that it's hard to imagine a stakeholder that would want to use Team Explorer instead of the web UI. The second to the last section in the post covers the plan for on premises TFS.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Hosted TFS". Do you mean VS Online? Do you mean on prem TFS? Or do you mean something else?

Brian

5 years ago

George

The stakeholders change is *great*. Question on it — can stakeholders see AppInsights dashboards, too? I have about 2-3x the number of people who want to be able to see the dashboards than need access to bugs/work items …

If they can't, consider that a feature request!

Another item that would be great would be a monthly VSO account level that included the Visual Studio Ultimate SKU, or a new SKU that enabled test engineers to create tests who will never need 90% of what Ultimate provides.

@George, We haven't settled on the licensing for Application Insights yet. One of our general theories of stakeholders is that they should be able to see dashboards. As such, being able to see App Insights dashboards would be consistent with that but until we finalize the business model, I can't make a commitment.

Yes, we'd like to have monthly subscriptions for other products (like Ultimate). We're not there yet but I do expect we'll do something in that area in the future.

Brian

4 years ago

Shaun Bradley

Hi Brian

+1 for reidca's comments also.

I really can't imagine a scenario where a PO would want to be a tester too unless a lack of resources in the business forced them into it. Yes, they need the more advanced backlog management features like Portfolio/Storyboarding and also might occasionally like to view the definition and outcome of various tests but they do not need to run them.

For the Product Owner, it's all about the backlog: creating, maintaining, decomposing and deciding on 'done'.

They don't really care about the in-sprint tasks, source code, builds and often don't care too much about the detail of the tests – so long as they prove the acceptance criteria. I'm sure that in software development businesses, things are different but there are armies of us out outside that world who would love to use these tools fully and simply cannot due to a lack of PO licensing.

I agree that the licensing model for on-prem used to be difficult to navigate at first, but no-one wants to fight a *losing* business case for licences that, in name alone, fall at the first hurdle and do not fit with the Agile education we've been giving the business all these years. POs are not Test Professionals and, believe it or not, the name alone really makes a difference.

Of course, I must also agree that the Test Pro price is very high for a role which is using less features and for far less time throughout the project lifecycle.

These are the two issues that prevent my business from allowing me to use TFS to its full potential:

1. Name (so perception) and 2. price.

Remember, these decision makers still often view those of us selling your product to them (IT) cynically enough. It's important to make it easy for us.

In the meantime, though I might sound like I'm ranting, I'm really not. I welcome the opportunity to feedback on the product from our perspective and view the changes described above as massively encouraging: Surely it's only a matter of time before we can license (and properly engage) our product-owners too?

@Shaun, thanks. By that definition of PO, I think, for VS Online at least, VS Online Advanced has everything you need. Is that a reasonable solution? For on prem, I understand and Test Pro is the closest thing we have at the moment but I'll keep your feedback for future reference.

Brian

4 years ago

Shaun Bradley

@Brian

Hi. Thanks for replying. Indeed it would be. I have a personal trial account of VSOnline Advanced myself and it seems to offer the right functionality set.

However, there are two issues which currently block us from adopting it in the business:

1. A preference within the business towards one-off spend (or perhaps against ongoing operational costs);

2. The current inability to customise process templates to fit *our* processes.

So an on-prem solution would be very welcome for us, assuming we're not alone in our thinking.

I have introduced VSO to my company and I m trying to organize it around VSO. So I have the customer support team who just needs to file bugs and customer requests in the system and the stakeholder licence is exactly what we need. So I told them to wait until mid August based on this article. But now I see this feature might be out in September. Can you please keep us up to date in your progress?

Eg

Shaun Bradley is right

Customizing process template is a must. I m even considering going to TFS on-prem because of that.

@Kostas, Stakeholder licensing is coming soon. It got delayed a little bit due to the outage we had last week but we are working on the details for rolling it out now. Not more than a week I'd say.

Brian

4 years ago

Kostas Xagoraris

Thank you very much for your immediate reply Brian!

I m looking forward to it

Best regards

Kostas

4 years ago

SirajZ

Will it (VSO) allow us to request feedback(feature) to be assigned to free stakeholders (free users). Is this part of Test Hub includes.

Regards

4 years ago

Patrick

@Brian

We are looking to move to vsOnline but want to keep our build servers on-Prem and add Release Mangement on-prem.

We currently have a mix of MSDN subscriptions and TFS CALS which would be replaced by VsOnline User licenses.

What I am unable to find is the licensing requirement for such a scenario. Would a VSOnline user also need a CAL to start an On-Premise Release or an On-Premise build or does the VSOnline user account provide CAL coverage for on-Premise components?

4 years ago

DanielT

Hi Brian,

I really like the direction you are going with your Team – not only regarding licensing.

I have an enterprise customer that is interested in switching to TFS but can't use 2013 just yet, because they haven't certified SQL 2012 for production use. Will that licensing change for on-premise users also apply to TFS 2012?

And before you ask: Anything cloud based, including VS online is out of the question for these guys. The two showstoppers are legal reasons (I'm from Germany) and that they can't customize the work items.

@Patrick, This is one of the licensing wierdnesses we have yet to clean up. Officially any use of an on prem TFS component requires a CAL. It's a bit nutty for these hybrid kinds of scenarios and I'd like to see the VS Online license cover it but I need to get that fixed. I'll use this as a reminder to go work on it.

@DanielT, Unfortunately, no, the licensing changes don't apply to TFS 2012 – only to 2013.4 and later. We had to actually make code changes to support the licensing changes. Hopefully you can get SQL 2012 certification covered quickly 🙁

Brian

4 years ago

Finn

We often have end-users who need to conduct some basic test runs for User Acceptance Testing. No explicit need to access anything else such as backlogs, work items (apart from test cases) etc. It would be really useful if there was a stakeholder licence (or something with a low fee) that would allow them to run such tests that sit in an on-premise TFS installation.

@Finn, this is a scenario we are looking at but I don't have anything to tell you today.

Brian

4 years ago

Steve Lewis

I really hope that you are able to implement this for TFS 2013 soon. We have too many people in our company that need this level of involvement in our projects that are currently limited due to licensing costs.

4 years ago

Brandon Wittwer

Brian, we're all pretty interested in this stakeholder license teaser. I had one additional question. Is it Microsoft's hope that Product Owners still purchase full CAL licenses only to give them backlog prioritization capabilities? The stakeholder license gets TFS 90% of the way towards being able to use TFS as a cost effective SCRUM project management tool. The sheer number of product owners that need to access backlogs makes CALS a silly expensive requirement. My corporation is using Trello for all the useful parts of Scrum APM and only using TFS for task tracking and bugs. It's a sad time seeing so much of TFS go underutilized.

@Brandon, yes, the theory is that a product owner is part of the team and should have a CAL. In most organizations I work with there are significantly fewer POs than engineers. Is your org different than that? If so, how?

Brian

4 years ago

Orjan

Is this bad news for all our java developers. According to this they need a license to check in code? Or am I misinterpeting the text?

@Orjan, I'm not sure what you mean by bad news. These changes don't make anyone pay more than they were already paying. They only make people pay less. So, I think it should all be good news from your perspective. For developers who need code access, we provide 5 free licenses in every account. Beyond that you have to purchase monthly subscriptions (or MSDN) for additional developers. There's no differences between .NET developers, Java developers or any other kind of developer.

Brian

4 years ago

KS

Hi Brian,

My company are implementing TFS onsite and we have a query around stakeholders access to the test hub can you confirm my understanding is correct?

When the licensing changes for onsite TFS are implemented stakeholders can access the test hub on Web Access where they can create and run manual tests?

The blog above is specific to online so just wanted to make sure it will be the case for onsite TFS as well.

Thanks

4 years ago

Lori Lamkin, VSCS

@KS, the stakeholder license allows the ability to use work item tracking to create/query/edit bugs, and view backlogs and boards. Stakeholders aren't able to view the test hub. The stakeholder can use the feedback tool to give open ended feedback including capturing screenshots and videos and create feedback work items. The stakeholder cannot create or execute tests. This is the case for VSO and will be the case for TFS on prem when the stakeholder license goes live in update 4.

I have a project I'd like to share with some people, but I'm the only effective developer on it: that is, I am the only one that needs check in permission, while all others only need reader permissions (to see how the code is progressing and be able to connect to it from Visual Studio Community for instance and be able to get the latest version of the code).

Is there any alternative to add an unlimited number of such "reader-only" participants without any added costs? If not, could you explain the rationale behind such decision?

@Juliano, No, we don't provide unlimited, free access to source control. We do provide 5 free users in each account that you could use for this purpose. As for why we don't – mostly because there hasn't been much demand for that scenario. I'm not philosophically opposed to it.

Brian

4 years ago

Dustin Johnson

Hi Brian,

I have a two person team that will only be accessing the user administration functionality (add/remove team members only) via the TFS 2013 web interface. According to the TFS team that controls the server, this ability is available through the web interface. This new user admin team will not be providing any other support or require additional access beyond adding/removing team members. What type of license will this require?

@Dustin, I know it's a big dang document but if you look at the licensing whitepaper here: http://www.microsoft.com/…/details.aspx, you'll see on page 27, a list of uses for which Team Foundation Server does not require a client license. The list includes:

• Up to two devices or users that only access Team Foundation Server to perform system administration, such as creating Team Projects or Project Collections.

I think that will cover your scenario, so your two administrators don't need any license.

Brian

4 years ago

Dustin Johnson

Excellent! Thank you so much for your time!!

4 years ago

mast

we are using TFS 2013 update 3. Currently we are mainly using TFS for source control management and we have all users that access source control for checkin/checkout/branching etc with a CAL licences.

once the TFS 2013 update 4 comes, do we need separate license for TFS CAL?

can i use the source control operation with Stakeholder capabilities? if i need to add more users can we setup them as Stakeholder without buying CAL license?

4 years ago

mastsetup

we are using TFS 2013 update 3. Currently we are mainly using TFS for source control management and we have all users that access source control for checkin/checkout/branching etc with a CAL licences.

once the TFS 2013 update 4 comes, do we need separate license for TFS CAL?

can i use the source control operation with Stakeholder capabilities? if i need to add more users can we setup them as Stakeholder without buying CAL license?